A Hidden Treasure in Sardinia: Grandma Annamaria And the Fresh Pasta of Carloforte

Grandma Annamaria recounts the history of her family and of her Sardinian town in three types of pasta.

“What is the five-star restaurant serving today?” Andrea asks Annamaria over the phone, as he does every day while coming home from the countryside or from fishing. They’ve been married for a long time, so maybe the old Italian saying that a man is won over—and above all, kept—at the table still holds true. “A simple tomato sauce or garden vegetable sauce,”she answers modestly. Yes, but what pasta? “Ours: curzetti or maccaruin or cazzulli.”

These are the typical types of pasta from Carloforte, the main town on the Isola di San Pietro, a small island off the southern shores of Sardinia. It’s the town from which Annamaria has never moved, and to where her husband has returned. She was born there, got married there and had two children there. Now, besides being adored by her grandchildren, she is in demand for lunches and dinners with friends, beloved for those specialties that she has learned from her own grandmother: stuffed and fried onions, fish fry, and ciambella. But first and foremost, handmade pasta.

“They used to put a small chair next to us and give us a small piece of dough to learn with,” she remembers. Buying macaroni or spaghetti was out of the question, because in those times, a wife was considered “complete” only when she presents her husband a perfect plate of pasta made with her own hands and served with a sauce the way God intended.

But Annamaria wound up with a rather peculiar husband, an extroverted world traveler who left town very young as a boat mechanic and then was always away until he retired. Even now, Andreino, as they refer to him in the town, is an odd character by island standards. He speaks excellent French, which he picked up from his international travels. On summer evenings he livens up the town center by “serenading” passerby with a group of friends. And he’s one of the main voices of the church choir. Annamaria follows his lead during Sunday mass by singing the beautiful “Ave Maria” in dialect. After which a plate of curzetti is a must.

Grandma Annamaria

Curzetti, maccaruin, cazzulli

In a corner of the kitchen we see the serneggiu, a tool made of canes that looks like a cross between a guitar and a basket. It’s what is used to put lines on the cazzulli, a pasta that’s somewhere between gnocchi piemontesi in terms of shape and Sardinian malloreddus for the dough.

Its roots are in an homage to Carlo Emanuele II, King of Sardinia, who gifted the then-uninhabited island to a group of Genoese, exiled from the island of Tabarka, near the Tunisian coast. The second local type of pasta are curzetti, small disks cut from sheet dough by pressing it with fingers; these are close relatives, also in name, to the corzetti from the Ligurian coast. Finally, there are the maccaruin, rolled and rounded hollow pasta stretching about five inches long. The name harks back to Latin, in which any dough made with cereals and water was called “maccaruin.”

In the summer in the town you have zucchini, green beans and facusse, the latter a type of long and twisted cucumber, sweet and thirst-quenching, imported centuries ago from Tunisia. In the fall there are mushrooms and tomato sauce, and in the winter, cauliflower, cabbage, and dry fava beans. Then when spring comes, you can find peas and fresh fava beans. In all seasons there is garlic, basil and marjoram. But the most flavorful local sauce includes tuna, the true wealth of the island.

In the popular tradition, when making a tuna sauce for the pasta, you do not use the most valuable parts, but rather the buzzonaglia—the pulp along the central bone, which is dark and less refined, but has an intense flavor that is ideal for a sauce. During the summer you can find it fresh at the local fishmongers, while year-round you can get it preserved in oil.

Put the buzzonaglia in a pan on a bed of tomato purée, flavored with a little onion and marjoram. On the side, prepare a green sauce with a bunch of basil, oil and salt. Sautée the pasta (cooked al dente) in the red sauce, turn off the heat, add the green sauce and pecorino. Mix well, and serve immediately.